Looking Up: Gemini the Twins; seeing double in the stars

Friday

Jan 27, 2017 at 12:37 PMJan 27, 2017 at 12:53 PM

Peter Becker More Content Now

The constellation Gemini the Twins is well placed in the winter evening sky, to the left of Orion.This patch of stars, scattered at random across a portion of the sky, was long, long ago imagined to form a pattern of twins by the names of Castor and Pollux.It takes some imagination to see the assembly of stars as a couple brothers standing next to each other, but the late, famed star watcher and children’s book author and illustrator H.A. Rey did just that. He connected the stars in such a way, they really do look like two stick figures holding hands!Gemini the Twins is prominent in the winter evening sky. In late January or early February, around 8 p.m., the constellation is high up in the south-southeast. It is easy to recognize the more famous and brighter constellation Orion, to the lower right. Orion of course is marked by the three stars in a row making Orion’s ”belt” . The bright red-orange star Betelgeuse is in the upper left corner of Orion. From Betelgeuse, to the left and a bit higher for the stars of the Twins.Castor and Pollux are the names of the two brightest stars in Gemini, at far left at this time of evening. Imagined as the Twins’ heads, Pollux is the lower of the two and appears orange. Castor is a little brighter, and is blue-white.Over to the far right among what we refer to as the Twins’ “feet” stars, is a beautiful open star cluster, M35. Appearing as a small fuzzy patch (about the apparent width of the Moon) with binoculars, barely resolved into stars, it is a showpiece in a small telescope. You’ll see approximately 200 stars at once!M35 is about 2,800 light years away. That’s how many years it takes the starlight to reach our eyes.This season (winter 2017), the brightest asteroid in the Solar System, Vesta, happens to be passing through Gemini the Twins. At magnitude +6, it is barely visible to unaided eyes in a very dark sky but binoculars will show it right away. Because asteroids look the same as stars in even your telescope, you need a good star chart that shows Vesta’s gradual movement from night to night, to pick out which is Vesta! Sky and Telescope and Astronomy magazines have good charts, shown on their web sites at www.skyandtelescope.com and www.astronomy.com, respectively.First quarter Moon is on Friday, February 3rd.Keeping looking up!

—Peter Becker is managing editor at The News Eagle in Hawley, PA. Notes are welcome at news@neagle.com. Please mention in what newspaper or web site you read this column.

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